Adela, the daughter, married Casimir, King of Titia,—­and of her descendants more anon.

Hugo, the younger son, was born some ten years after his brother,—­to be accurate, in 1756,—­and after the old King had laid aside his sword and retired into the quiet of his later years.  With an honestly inherited love of fighting, and the inborn hostility to England that, even then, had existed in the Valerians for a hundred years, Hugo watched with quickening interest the struggle between the North American Colonies and Great Britain which began in 1775.  When the Marquis de Lafayette threw in his fortunes with the Americans, Hugo had begged permission to follow the same course.  This the old King had sternly refused; pointing out its impropriety from both a political and a family aspect.

But Hugo was far from satisfied, and his desire to have a chance at England waxing in proportion as the Colonies’ fortunes waned, he at last determined to brave his fierce old father and join the struggling American army whether his sire willed it or no.  His mind once formed, he would have been no true son of Henry had he hesitated.

The King heard him quietly to the end,—­too quietly, indeed, to presage well for Hugo.  Then he answered: 

“I take it sir, your decision is made beyond words of mine to change.  Of course, I could clap you into prison and cool your hot blood with scant diet and chill stones, but, such would be scarce fitting for a Dalberg.  Neither is it fitting that a Prince of Valeria should fight against a country with which I am at peace.  Therefore, the day you leave for America will see your name stricken from the rolls of our House, your title revoked, and your return here prohibited by royal decree.  Do I make myself understood?”

So far as I have been able to learn, no one ever accused my great-grandfather of an inability to understand plain speech, and old Henry’s was not obscure.  Indeed, Hugo remembered it so well that he made it a sort of preface in the Journal which he began some months thereafter, and kept most carefully to the very last day of his life.  The Journal says he made no answer to his father save a low bow.

Two days later, as plain Hugo Dalberg, he departed for America.  For some time he was a volunteer Aide to General Washington.  Later, Congress commissioned him colonel of a regiment of horse; and, as such, he served to the close of the war.  When the Continental Army was disbanded, he purchased a place upon the eastern shore of Maryland; and, marrying into one of the aristocratic families of the neighborhood, settled down to the life of a simple country gentleman.

He never went back to the land of his birth, nor, indeed, even to Europe.  And this, though, one day, there came to his mansion on the Chesapeake the Valerian Minister to America and, with many bows and genuflections, presented a letter from his brother Frederick, announcing the death of their royal father and his own accession, and offering to restore to Hugo his rank and estates if he would return to court.